Protests and Paradigms

In today's Wall Street Journal, John Goodman explains the town hall protests against health insurance reform, arguing that these protests are not "organized" but represent an outpouring of genuine popular opposition. The truth of his assertion depends on how one defines organization.
In fact, the current health reform debate is simply the most recent iteration of a long term organizing project. This project has been a resounding success: it has generated a paradigm that organizes virtually all discussion about inequality in the United States.
Paradigms are powerful precisely because they are invisible. They define what questions can be asked and what answers are acceptable. They organize data, true, but are more important in that they organize the way that data are gathered.
Paradigms are like invisible fences: you don't notice them as long as you stay inside, but if you try to move beyond them, you will be unpleasantly reminded that they exist. The current health care debate has moved too close to the edges of the paradigm: the public protests are, like electric currents at the edge of invisible fences, intended to shock us back inside.
In the United States, the development and implementation of social policy is organized by a paradigm that privileges differences over similarities. It specifies that the first question to be asked by social policy ought to be "can we do without it?" and that the second ought to be "if we have to have it, how can we limit its benefits to the smallest possible number of recipients?" Just as the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic view of the universe meant that questions that began "but what if the earth revolves around the sun..." were either heretical or silly, the American social policy paradigm selects against universalist questions that begin "but couldn't we provide service for everybody?"
The current social policy paradigm emphasizes small payoffs to selected groups of the needy, and large payoffs to selected groups of the more affluent and more powerful. An example: the internal revenue code offers mortgage interests deductions to virtually all middle-class homeowners, but housing assistance programs for low-income individuals and families are managed through programs that operate more like public assistance, making them relatively scarce and relatively hard to access. The prevailing social welfare paradigm consequently rewards cleavages and penalizes unity.
Once in place, paradigms are "sticky": like bad house guests, they hang around long after they have ceased to make a positive contribution. The United States social welfare paradigm has political implications- it guarantees that the most influential players will continue to be those that require the least assistance from social policies. And this, in turn, means that the future distribution of sticks and carrots is unlikely to change.
The American paradigm has another unfortunate feature. It structures the process of comparison. This is evident in the rhetoric of the current health care debate: protestors do not compare their situation to that of less fortunate individuals and ask what could be done to assist them. Rather, they compare their current situation to that which might prevail in some feared future. Similarly, protestors - and even policy analysts like Mr. Goodman- do not compare the United State's provision for low-income individuals with that of other nations. Rather, they focus on their personal satisfaction.
The operation of this paradigm is evident, for example, in Mr. Goodman's assertion that 84% of the individuals in a recent survey were happy with their health insurance. A genuinely comparative perspective would ask questions about this report: Was the sample comprised only of insured individuals? If not, were the uninsured respondents happy with their situation as well? Did the respondents understand the implicit choice to be one between their insurance and no insurance? Were they given the option of choosing between their insurance and the more comprehensive and less expensive plans offered, for instance, in nations like Switzerland?
This brings us back to the town hall protesters. They turn out to be organized after all: they are kept in line by the invisible paradigmatic fence.
To see Goodman's article, go to:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204884404574362333085067364.html